I know this is how people in the 80s and 90 imagined the future and a lot of concepts were probably too far fetched for them.
BUT... why arent they using drones to explore planets? why are there not more drone-spaceships? why does enterprise need a crew to begin with? Why is there so little automation? Why so few uses of AI in general?
I am saying this as a star trek the next generation person. I'd also expect them to have full video and sensory streams of any surface mission teams.
You also have to consider that TV executives were also considering this, and punting any ideas they thought wouldn't be accepted by a TV watching audience of the 80's/90's. Like the planned gay characters who were scrapped.
I mean, think about that, being gay in the future was too much for some television executives to accept, I really wouldn't be shocked if they gave thumbs down on lots of more esoteric and abstract episode concepts simply because they thought it would be too above the heads of a 90's TV audience.
And to be fair, they were probably right. The communicator seems less amazing now that we live in a world with cell phones, but back then a personal communications device that was on your person at all times seemed definitely in the realm of sci-fi. Now we all have a near-equivalent in our pockets, as well as it being general purpose computing device that can be used as a personal communicator and much more. Our communicator is also a primitive tricorder.
Some of the ideas they did let pass were either already accepted tech from the original series or were close to existing civilian or military hardware that was in it's infancy.
So a combination of "this was the extent of human imagination about these concepts back then" combined with "television executives are keenly aware of ideas the general public won't understand, and doesn't like confusing audiences, and thus will cut any content they deem too abstract or confusing" is what I think actually happened. One part actual limitation of imagination, one part purposeful limitation of imagination as to not to confuse the audience.
Which, honestly, is fair. Do you think sci-fi series like Rick & Morty would exist as they do without all previous sci-fi series laying down frameworks we understand for it to be based on? Human knowledge and ideas do build on themselves, and so, in a way, the TV executives are half-right that you can't overexpose an unexposed audience. You kind of have to slowly spoon feed them ideas over time.
Like, what if we tried sending Rick & Morty as a show back to the 1960's, and how many of the ideas would be entirely over the audiences heads? Simply because they didn't have 60 years of sci-fi media relating different iterations of these various ideas until "the multiverse" is just talked about like it is just a given thing that exists, and nobody questions it. At least a few would have trouble wrapping their minds around it, because while many of these ideas were pioneered in the Original Series, their lack of depth might leave audiences back then really confused about some of the ideas presented.
To further add to the idea that the concepts themselves were not foreign to people at the time, just read some classic scifi from Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. Or even older than that, and check out some of Da Vinci's ideas. There are even ancient Greek writings clearly describing the idea of many modern inventions we take for granted today. People are rather imaginative and inventive, and can generally take a simple idea to extreme heights long before we have all the necessary knowledge and tooling to make it reality. Even now, we know how we might do a lot of stuff only seen in fiction like warp travel and Dyson spheres, nanotechnology, etc. We just haven't got some of the requirements to actually do those things nailed down yet.
Too right, exposure to those kind of ideas has grown over time, and thus given the modern era the ability to take those ideas mainstream, because of the simple breadth of media available. We often take it for granted that even a hundred years ago, it wasn't super easy to get a hold of books, let alone catch every film release. Now a near infinite stream of media is literally available at people's fingertips. The speed and amount of media that exist has contributed heavily to a more informed modern audience that can digest these ideas more easily, because they've simply been exposed to more media explaining the basics underlying such ideas.
No human being alive in the 1960s could have survived the amount of drugs they would have needed to ingest to create Rick and Morty in the 1960s.
I feel like if you built a time machine and took Rick and Morty back to the 1960s, it would have just looked like flashing images on a screen or a nightmare straight out of hell to them, their minds would have not been able to process what was going on not because there's any real depth to the series but just because we have so much exposure to the topic content that we are able to process it where is the closest person in the 1960s would have had is a few episodes of the black and white Lost in space or a little bit of Twilight zone maybe.
Exactly, media moves so much faster now, so they literally had a smaller frame of reference and were exposed to far fewer of these ideas than modern audiences. We take it for granted now, but it used to be difficult to get your hands on media that was more obtuse or complicated, because often they didn't have copies at your local library, and as such, audiences back then just wouldn't have the frames of reference that we do in allowing us to understand the concepts and references to other existing media.
Ask me how I know you're not into foreign and independent film of that time period, nor from the several decades preceding it.
Well I think it's fair to say I've not been exposed to much pre 1960s foreign and independent film, although I do feel there might have been a nicer way to broach the topic what would you recommend to get me familiar with it?
Specifically anything that would prepare my imaginary 1959 brain for the horrors of Rick and Morty would be most appreciated.
The obvious answer would be any Buñuel film, Un Chien Andalou was released in 1929 and is appreciably more viscerally intense than pretty much anything on TV today. Far from the only example. Don't fall into the trap of thinking our modern ideas are new, they aren't, everything new you will ever see was previously thought of, tried out, and discarded by past people whose culture didn't have a use for it at the time. Everything. It's incredibly misguided to think a modern cartoon would be overwhelmingly intense to a supposed primitive of the 1960s, only perceived as colors and motion. It's a form of teleological presentism that perpetuates the fiction that we're somehow more intellectually developed than people who came before us. That happens a lot. It makes us uncomfortable to admit that a paleolithic man could function as well in a modern office as any of us, so we invent feel-good myths about how we're more intellectually sophisticated than every past generation, but we aren't. Not socially, not biologically, not at all. It isn't surprising that people still believe in pop-pseudohistory like the so-called Dark Ages, a Renaissance fiction.